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Post by gilbert on Jan 2, 2016 0:11:26 GMT -5
An interesting tidbit I found while digging around the web for case studies; one site said that the secret is to quickly push one branch through the side, so it can feed the plant, while steadily hilling up the other stems of the plant, without every letting them get above the mulch by more then an inch, and grow leaves.
Now, I don't think there is just one "magic step" but I think that if I can add up twenty "magic steps" I might be on to something.
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Post by nathanp on Jan 2, 2016 0:48:17 GMT -5
I am extremely skeptical of the last one. Impossible yields in my opinion. 60 lbs per tower?!?! No documentation to prove it.
See my links previously in page 1 of this.
Also, Curzio has fairly comprehensively shown that potatoes do not set tubers in straw. The stem will grow through it, but you won't fool the stem into thinking it is soil. Hilling with straw works for a mulch, and works to retain water and add organic matter as it decomposes, but not to increase yield through additional layers of tubers or to may the plant think it should set tubers in it.|
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Post by Joseph Lofthouse on Jan 2, 2016 3:16:35 GMT -5
As far as I can tell, the purpose of hilling potatoes is not to increase yield... It is to prevent them from being exposed to sunlight and becoming poisonous.
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Post by nathanp on Jan 2, 2016 7:34:58 GMT -5
As far as I can tell, the purpose of hilling potatoes is not to increase yield... It is to prevent them from being exposed to sunlight and becoming poisonous. Right, except in a tower (especially a tall one), the hypothetical intent of hilling deeply is to provide additional growing medium for the potato to grow through and set tubers in. But commercial potatoes have been bred to set tubers in one location/elevation, so hilling deeply is not worthwhile. There are some non commercial potatoes that set tubers off stolons that will set tubers at different locations/elevations within a taller tower, but they will not do so in straw. They will only do so if the stolons stay buried in soil, otherwise they grow leaves instead of tubers. Papa Chonca is one like this. Some additional links: KPP growing in bagsKenosha - growing in boxes
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Post by reed on Jan 2, 2016 7:57:36 GMT -5
One time I had a rather vigorous potato vine that grew volunteer in a big compost heap. The potato that sprouted was way down toward the bottom, probably 2 1/2 - 3 feet deep. It had two or three very large potatoes. That is all it had though, no potatoes grew on the stem above.
That particular potato only made at the level where the original potato sprouted, all the rest was just stem looking for sunlight. Maybe if others had been planted at intervals above there would have been more? Or would the ones closest to the top have found the sun first and hogged it all? Also, personally I would rather have a couple dozen smaller potatoes than two or three great big ones.
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Post by gilbert on Jan 2, 2016 9:47:48 GMT -5
Hi Nathanp and others,
Yes, I'm making no claims as to the truth or falsity of these various "case studies."
How did you build your tower? Also, where was it located, climate wise?
I know you mentioned removing commercial varieties from my list of potential varieties. Which ones in particular?
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Post by nathanp on Jan 2, 2016 14:43:07 GMT -5
This is exactly what you want if you are harvesting mechanically. All the potatoes at a single height level and all at the same time. This is why commercial potatoes are not well suited to vertical growing conditions. They have been bred for that. You could do multiple layers of tubers as you suggest, but I suspect what you may find is the bottom layer would senesce sooner than desired if the stems get buried repeatedly. They expend their energy growing taller than they normally would at the expense of tubers. I am in Rhode Island, zone 6b/7, depending on how it is rated. I am coastal, so the climate is a bit more moderate than further inland in New England. This link below shows the design I followed. 35" high, 24" in width and depth. 2x4 construction on the bottom row, with 1x6's in each row above that. Building a potato towerI have tried and failed with the following: Red Norland Purple Viking Satina Purple Peruvian CIP396286-7 Doty Todd I abandoned using all commercial potatoes for this experiment after the failures of year 1. I have abandoned all commercial potatoes that do not set true seed (TPS) from my garden entirely, and have since dropped all varieties that suffer from male sterility, except perhaps one or two. Eventually those will be dropped as well. The first 4 I would consider commercial varieties. I grow the last 4 and tried all four of those because they set tubers high, and the last 3 set tubers off stolons. Just not in towers, apparently. They will do so when grown in the ground. Papa Chonca grown in the ground sets tubers off stolons, and I have found them over 30" away from the planted tuber. Ideal for a tower, including setting tubers off the buried stem. I also drilled holes and left space between the boards in the bin to allow stolons and parts of the stem to protrude from the bins. Papa Chonca is really the only one I have tried that this benefited. As for commercial varieties, basically if it is a Western European or North American bred potato (with some exceptions), it will suffer from male sterility. If you trace the pedigree back and find Early Rose, or Garnet chili in it's pedigree, it is possibly male sterile. These two sites are useful, and one of them rates frequency of flowering. Europotato Variety IndexPotato Pedigree lookup
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Post by gilbert on Jan 2, 2016 19:51:34 GMT -5
Hi Nathanp,
Thanks for the advice!
Do you think flowers are related to weather/ stress in any way? I.e., if I really stressed a burbank potato, would it produce some seeds because it thinks it is going to die?
I will look through those sites.
I need to reduce that list anyway, since I can't buy them all the first year, so maybe I will only look for varieties that are known to produce true seed.
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Post by gilbert on Jan 2, 2016 19:55:07 GMT -5
Case study 5. Two classic layered wire potato towers, layers of straw and compost, 3 pounds of potato seed planted, Magic Molly, German Butterball, and Rose Finn Fingerlings. Wisconsin near Lake Michigan. Fail: three pounds of potatoes planted to produce 3.25 pounds of potatoes. Possibly due to slugs in the spring and then dry weather. www.theimpatientgardener.com/2014/10/the-potato-tower-experiment-results.html
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Post by gilbert on Jan 2, 2016 20:05:50 GMT -5
So, looking through the case studies, nothing jumps out. Layering many layers of seed potatoes sometimes works better, but sometimes not. And it does not always produce proportional results; i.e., three times as much seed might only produce twice as many potatoes. I would think that things drying out in the straw lined wire bins would be prone to drying out, but the one wooden bin included failed, which should have been much more water retentive.
Two things might be worth improving; some sort of water reservoir might help, either of the olla type or of the wicking bucket type. And I think a bulkier tower would have less fluctuations in temperature and or soil moisture. If the diameter of the tower was doubled, it might help a lot. All the case study towers were relatively thin.
Another thing is that straw can sometimes contain various growth inhibiting chemical residues; I wonder if some of the really terrible results could be put down to that. Also I'm wondering if the nitrogen draw down by all that straw was simply too much. As far as I can remember, none of the studies talked about adding extra nitrogen.
Finally, many of them used compost as a main component in their mix, or even the whole of the mix. Store bought compost can be mostly wood chips and little nutrients. Any compost might be an unbalanced diet. I'd be inclined to use a peat/ sand/ perlite/ compost potting mix with some added fertilizer.
I'm contacting the one person with the enormous yields to see if they repeated the experiment, and or if they have any pictures or other documentation.
From this point out I will only post case studies if I find something really different. But if anybody has ever grown a tower, please let us know!
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Post by nathanp on Jan 2, 2016 23:16:28 GMT -5
Yes flowers are very related to weather, but not all varieties are the same with the conditions they like. However, pollination is not related to the weather. Some are male sterile, meaning they cannot pollinate themselves or others. I believe Russet Burbank is male sterile. It can be the recipient of pollen to create a berry, but it will not produce berries without cross pollination. Kennebec is another that is similarly male sterile. I grew Kennebec two years ago. About 120 plants. I had about a half dozen or so berries on 120 plants. The seed here is 100% hybrid, meaning it was crossed with pollen from other varieties of potato, and since I made no attempts to cross this one, it was 100% crossed. I will be growing a few of the TPS out this year just to see what they are like, but I will not keep them long term, as I do not want male sterility in the genepool of what I am growing. Here is a link to a working document that represents a rough growing guide to producing berries. This is from Timothy Kazmierczak from the USDA-Grin growing station in Sturgeon Bay, WI. Growing potatoes for TPS
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Post by nathanp on Jan 2, 2016 23:24:53 GMT -5
I think this is the case with any container grown plant. They dry out faster than a plant in the ground. I use a 3" piece of PVC pipe with 1/4" holes drilled in it around the bottom 18". I water not only from the top, but also into this PVC pipe that is positioned in the center of the bin, vertically. It is unclear whether this actually helps or not, to me.
I would think this would help as well, but then if you are doing that, you might as well keep doubling it and just grow them in raised beds.
That may be true, it may not. I have no means to test for that, but I no longer use straw for that reason. I have used pine shavings for mulch. Regardless, straw without chemical residues works well for mulch. But tubers will not set in it. The plants know it is not soil. I need to ask Curzio for his support for this. It was on his old website, but I no longer see the link, and he is halfway into migrating his info to the new site.
Too much nitrogen also can result in excess vegetation growth at the expense of the tubers as well.
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Post by nathanp on Jan 2, 2016 23:37:24 GMT -5
Just got in touch with Curzio. He believes the comment is in his hour long video on youtube that is here: KPP Video from 2012Essentially this is what he said:
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Post by gilbert on Jan 3, 2016 13:06:59 GMT -5
Hi nathanp,
Thanks for all the information. Your knowledge of the subject is quite impressive!
I put a piece of PVC into the middle of my sweet potato tower, as you mentioned above. I'm not sure if it helped, since I did not have a control. Interestingly, my sweet potato tower yielded ten pounds, better then what some of the above case studies got with Irish potatoes.
Tower versus raised bed; I guess that is kind of a grey area. I would think that beds/ towers beyond a certain diameter would be prone to collapse; or, to say the same thing another way, raised beds would need a more expensive structure. I would think that the maximum width for a tower that one expected to be 4 feet high would be 7 feet, so that it could be reached across. Even that would be hard to construct hard to hill the potatoes in. But the three feet or so that most towers are just seems too narrow.
I suppose a raised bed with potatoes planted at the bottom and hilled up would have a tower type effect. The Biointensive folks do double digging and put the seed tubers about a foot down in the double dug bed. They claim that an experienced biointensive gardener can get over 780 pounds in a hundred square feet, but that intermediate skilled folks can only get 200.
I wonder, if tubers will bulk in finely mulched, moist straw, if they would bulk in rotted wood chips? I've got lots of that around. I would probably use straw around the outside of the tower, since I don't want tubers there anyway, and the straw would hold things in.
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Post by gilbert on Jan 3, 2016 13:14:14 GMT -5
Two more questions; is it worth trying to request TPS from the GRIN germplasim bank? I know Joseph did it. But A. the accessions don't have much information on them, so it would be a shot in the dark unless I found somebody there who was interested in helping me (unlikely, but not impossible; Carol Deppe got help with the popbean project from a USA GRIN curator) and B. they are not always thrilled to receive requests from amateurs. I would definitively document my research, but they might not think it important enough to send me any material.
Second question; what is the likelihood of getting inedible tubers out of a potato breeding project, assuming I only used edible tubers to start with? I'm wondering if potatoes complicated genetics might produce some rather toxic results, especially from wild/ landrace varieties. (Not to speak of the truly toxic wild types, which I will stay away from.)
I don't mind taste testing potatoes and eliminating bitter ones, but my urban farming group will be involved, more or less, and this is the factor that would determine if it should be less or more. In other words, I don't want to end up giving somebody bitter tubers.
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